A significant amount of traffic in our cities is generated by the delivery of goods to shops, factories, offices, hotels, etc. These vehicles take up more space than cars and require space to load and unload.

The thematic group looks at overall strategies to create cleaner and better freight transport in cities.

The CIVITAS Policy Note “Making urban freight more sustainable” aims to raise awareness and increase knowledge of urban freight issues and challenges by providing a general overview of urban freight issues and definitions, as well as, indications of future trends.

Youth For Public Transport (Y4PT) Foundation, with the support of the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) and its members, and following the long-standing tradition of Y4PT Youth Lab series, is promoting the organization of local transport hackathons around the world, by combining the best of boundless human creativity and the benefits of current information and communications technologies (ICTs) in collaborative environments, with the aim of advancing transport sector towards sustainability.

Winners from each local transport hackathon will join other Canada-based hackers at the 1st Y4PT Global Transport Hackathon Montreal 2017 ( http://www.y4pt.org/projects/hackathon ) in the framework of the 62nd UITP Global Public Transport Summit Montreal 2017 – the world’s oldest and leading sustainable transport event – to contest in a final round for unveiling the world’s best ground-breaking transport solutions.

More than 20 major cities around the world are hosting the first local transport hackathons. Other cities are also welcome to join.

Different local stakeholders such as universities, youth groups, ICT companies, transport operators, authorities, start-up mentors and hackers are called to collaborate with Y4PT and to be part of the world’s first ever global transport hackathon.

Everyone is invited to get on board. This is an one-off opportunity to show to your audience and users how important is for you to support this kind of events where innovation and creativity is putting forward new ICT-related solutions to boost both the private sector business performance and the public sector policy efficacy, and thus to unlock new opportunities to expand, diversify and renew your organization’s portfolio of products and services.

Follow up the Y4PT Transport Hackathon series on social networking/media websites ( http://www.y4pt.org/social-networks ) such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube by using the hashtag #Y4PThackathon .

The EVIDENCE Project has researched and published the economic evidence for sustainable mobility measures. For those involved in training and educating the next generation of transport professionals, the project has made available course material on 7 sustainable mobility themes. These can be downloaded from the project website to be incorporated into your course framework.

The EVIDENCE project has analysed the economic evidence in more than 20 reports and papers on Urban Freight initiatives. Most evidence focuses on Urban Freight Consolidation Centres (UFCCs), showing positive impacts, in terms of cost savings and better service to logistics operators and final customers. UFCC Interventions are often small-scale with few impacts at city scale. Better economic assessment of schemes will require greater understanding of supply chain costs and benefits associated with urban freight measures. Commercial sensitivities, the lack of standardized evaluation and the experimental nature of some freight initiatives can make assessment more difficult.
To access this evidence on urban freight and other sustainable mobility initiatives, and to download the reports and reviews, please visit www.evidence-project.eu

The “sharing” paradigm is shaking up the global economy scenario. People across the world are daily sharing an increasing number of material objects and immaterial services (from clothes and tools to houses, working spaces and also professional skills). This revolution is affecting all the economic sectors, though at a different pace. No doubt the mobility sector is among the ones facing the greatest and revolutionary changes.

Although sharing options have always been available for transport, first with Public Transport and taxis and more recently with car or bike-sharing and car-pooling services, what is happening in these past few years is a radical change in the way all of us could rethink our mobility habits. Thanks to most advanced communication technologies (internet, social media and ITS) and to their integration, is now easier and immediate to find opportunities to share rides, vehicles (cars and bikes) and also parking spaces. Mobility is starting to be considered as a “unique “service and people across European cities are now looking for the best mobility options (and a combination of them), with a flexible approach un-known before.

So, disruptive changes are coming: how cities can adapt and actively react to these changes in order to exploit all the potential benefits of these changes towards the achievement of a sustainable urban mobility? How transport policies can offer and answer to the needs of people and to their increasing bent to share mobility? Which are the most interesting solutions and good practices have been adopted by cities at the forefront?

CIVITAS WIKI is now drafting a policy note on this topic with the aim to provide a brief but smart tool for cities offering a comprehensive overview on shared-mobility concepts, applications and practices (both the more consolidated and the innovative ones) to support decision/policy makers and urban mobility professionals in mobility planning.

Scope of this collaborative interaction is then to collect further resources, hints and suggestions, links to practical city experiences and, obviously, opinions and comments on this topic.

In the last months, the CIVITAS Urban Freight Logistics Thematic Group has been working on the topic of making urban freight logistics more sustainable. We have collected, analyzed, elaborated and shared inputs, experiences and perspectives from/with the CIVITAS community and beyond.

Goods delivery vehicles make up a significant share of the traffic in European cities and are a major contributor to deteriorating air quality, rising carbon emissions and congestion. To tackle these problems cities have different solution at disposal to implement. Starting from CIVITAS I to CIVITAS Plus, some successful measures have been collected and results are reported here. For more information on urban Freight Logistics, you can download the fifth Policy Note “Smart choices for cities: Making urban freight logistics more sustainable” fromwww.civitas.eu.

What followed were three days of vigorous debate, deliberation and exchange among the project’s six local authority and ten technical partners. Working across six co-creation laboratories, they are laying the foundations for a new generation of SUMP cities and putting sustainable mobility at the...

Throughout all stages, from pregnancy and infancy to finally doing the school run, family bicycles are a safe, healthy and inexpensive alternative to the car for transporting not only your children but a lot of other stuff as well.

Following a record-breaking conference in Brussels, which brought together over 600 participants in November 2019, the 2020 Polis Annual Conference will take place in Arnhem-Nijmegen City Region, Netherlands, on 2-3 December 2020.
The Polis Annual Conference provides an opportunity for cities and...

*** Due to the ongoing public health crisis across Europe and beyond, this event has been provisionally postponed until this autumn. Information on the new dates will be made available in due course.***
The three CIVITAS Living Lab projects – DESTINATIONS, ECCENTRIC and PORTIS – invite you to join t...

Mobility practitioners in Spain are invited to join a workshop being organised in Donostia-San Sebastian (Spain) on Wednesday 5 June 2019.
The workshop facilitates discussion and exchange of experiences on different challenges and solutions within the field of sustainable urban mobility planning.
Wh...

Cities are key to the sustainable future of our planet and great changes are necessary to address climate change and social inequalities.
The URBAN FUTURE Global Conference gathers CityChangers from all over the world, bringing together individuals who are involved in driving change towards more su...

The BuyZET project is glad to announce that the BuyZET final event will take place on 14 May 2019 in Brussels.
In CIVITAS BuyZET, three cities (Copenhagen, Rotterdam and Oslo) are testing new smart procurement approaches to influence the transportation footprint of purchased services, goods and veh...

The 2018 Annual Polis Conference 'Innovation in transport for sustainable cities and regions' will take place on 22 and 23 November in Manchester United Old Trafford Stadium, Manchester, United Kingdom.
It is the network's annual flagship event. It provides a unique platform to engage with represe...

CIVITAS Policy Note “Making urban freight more sustainable”

The CIVITAS Policy Note “Making urban freight more sustainable” aims to raise awareness and increase knowledge of urban freight issues and challenges by providing a general overview of urban freight issues and definitions, as well as, indications of future trends.

Wiki_Quotes-2015-09_1

The Policy Recommendations present the main findings arising from the evaluation of the CIVITAS Plus Collaborative Projects (CPs), which ran from 2008-2012.

This publication was written under the auspices of the CIVITAS POINTER project, which supported five collaborative projects (CP s) implemented within the framework of the third edition of the CIVITAS programme. Evaluation and monitoring were the key stones of CIVITAS POINTER. Drawing from first-hand, corroborated statistical evidence gathered from participating cities, this publication presents the results of the CIVITAS Plus cross-site evaluation and policy assessment. These findings support the development of clear European-level policy recommendations that have the potential for being embraced by all European cities — not just those which make up the CIVITAS community.

The document seeks to identify factors that can boost the effectiveness and consistency of future strategies, thereby securing greater sustainability in urban mobility patterns. Policy makers are provided with contemporary facts for debating purposes, and a number of conclusions and recommendations based on lessons learnt from CIVITAS Plus are put forward.

Giving back the public space to the people - Mobility measures in Vitoria-Gasteiz

In the context of the next CIVITAS study tour hosted by the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz on the 196&20 June 2014, an interested document presenting the mobility measures implmented by the city has been created:

DG MOVE European Commission: Study on Urban Freight Transport

The aim of this study is to review existing and planned practices and measures relating to the urban section of the freight transport chain across the Member States of the EU with a view to determine whether, to what extent and in which form, action at the European level can be envisaged to promote successful solutions and improve the performance of freight transport.

Urban goods transport, also known as urban Freight distribution, concerns a vast range of activities insuring an adequate level of service for a variety of urban supply chains.

This document reviews the trends and conditions of goods transport in urban areas, both within the formal and informal sectors. It outlines the fundamental contribution of goods transport for urban life, and points to the externalities generated by the sector.

The full document PLANNING AND DESIGN FOR SUSTAINABLE URBAN MOBILITY is available